The Pandemic Blog

Yesterday, the US experienced 1,908 Covid-19 deaths. This wasn’t the highest recent number; that was 2,384 on July 22. I had hoped that might be a peak and things would come down rapidly since then. But it looks like that was just another triumph of hope over reality – reality always wins in those cases. The even worse news is that yesterday was the first day the 7-day growth rate in total deaths was at 6%. The last time it was at this level was June 9, when it was in a rapid decline. We all know how that turned out. Since my projections of deaths are based entirely on the most recent 7-day growth rate, I’m now projecting that deaths for August will be about 9,000 higher than I projected yesterday. The papers were concerned this morning that we’re passing the milestone of 150,000 deaths so far in the pandemic. However, my projections now show us passing 200,000 at the end of August. In early June, I was thinking we might never even pass that number. Shows how things have chang...

NPR broadcast a short piece this morning quoting the noted epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota – as well as others – saying that the “test, contact trace, isolate” approach to fighting the coronavirus (used by every other country that has been successful in fighting it) is no longer sufficient, given the huge lead the virus has gained on us (in the US) in the last month and a half. We not only aren’t making any progress in containing the virus, we’ve slipped way behind, as evidenced by the fact that a huge portion of the tests that are being done currently are meaningless, since the positive result is often only available long after the infected person (with minimal or no symptoms) has had ample opportunity to infect other people – and of course they’ll in turn have ample opportunity to infect even more people since they won’t be able to get a quick test result either, etc. etc. Our problem literally from day one of the pandemic in the US (somet...